Practice Matters: Organising Persistence
Practice Matters is a project inquiring, highlighting and discussing design, architecture, spatial and urban practice and its ability to act in relation to present urgent issues of crisis and conflicts.
This first public event on the occasion of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 brings together four spatial practices and collectives to discuss how to organise and persist in relation to different contexts and scales of urgencies.
Presentations and discussions with Danica Sretenović and Debra Solomon (Krater Collective), Aljaž Škrlep (Robida Collective), Bianca Elzenbaumer (La Foresta), Merve Gül Özokcu and Mina Öner (Herkes için Mimarlık / Architecture for All), introduction and moderation by Magnus Ericson and Eylül Şenses.
Danica Sretenović and Debra Solomon presents Krater Collective as a mode of persistence in the feral position, continually challenging “the way things are.” They discuss potential ruptures within existing societal frameworks to enable transformation—from invisible to visible, from propaganda to conceptual thinking, from greenwashing to feral, from the inevitable to the questionable. Aljaž Škrlep will present Robida’s work as a practice of staying with the place: on one hand, with its historical present – living and learning from the remnants and ruins shaped by the complex history of this borderland – and on the other, with its experiential givenness – the cyclical rhythms of the seasons and the untamed flourishing of its vegetation. The landscapes of the post-rural, where the Robida Collective is based, murmur lessons in radical commitment: they resist the binary of abandonment versus development, instead gesturing toward a third orientation – that of dwelling, of staying-with. Bianca Elzenbaumer presents the practice of La Foresta in relation to how climate change and biodiversity are posing multidimensional challenges to the alpine territory. Locally these are still not perceived as challenges on which to act together – inventively and courageously. To channel these concerns and energies into regenerative action, with the project Station for Transformation, La Foresta are in the process of transforming a train station into a hub where the local community – inclusive of NGOs, public administrators, active citizens, educational institutions and business owners – is invited to put together perspectives and skills in order to jointly engage in these challenges. Merve Gül Özokcu and Mina Öner from Herkes İçin Mimarlık will share reflections from an ongoing post-disaster reconstruction process initiated in the aftermath of the February 6, 2023 earthquakes in Türkiye. Developed with affected communities, the projects prioritize collaboration over ready-made solutions, using techniques including superadobe and timber construction. Building together becomes a means of addressing urgent spatial needs and a way to affiliate with a collective association and foster connection. This practice unfolds within the layered realities of crisis, where persistence is shaped through care, improvisation, and the belief that architecture is something we do with, not for, others.
Practice Matters: Organising Persistence is organised by IASPIS in collaboration with Salt and Krater Collective, on the occasion of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. The programme is curated by Magnus Ericson, Eylül Şenses and Danica Sretenović.
Practices
Krater Collective is a group of transdisciplinary enthusiasts who were courageous to reinvent their respective professions, studios and working conditions to act as guardians of a rewilded ecosystem. Krater is a 18,000 m² pending construction site transformed into a feral ecosystem and a production space for non-affirmative creative practice in Ljubljana. Alongside site-specific work such as the cultivation of biodiversity, Krater hosts internationally acclaimed educational formats to introduce new typologies of work into human culture, laboratories to experiment with biomaterials, advocacy strategies, exhibitions, conferences, and other public programmes.
La Foresta is a community academy and a commons growing in a regenerated space at the train station of Rovereto (Trentino, Italy). La Foresta brings together small scale cultural associations, informal groups and active citizens to work on questions of community cohesion, the agro-ecological transition, mental health, the activation of traditional common lands and much more. Weekly activities that are participatory and convivial are hosted and promoted: growing and cooking, pickling and fermenting, kneading and baking, making music and dancing, hiking and exploring, drawing and printing, imagining and creating. Questions are raised and answers sought through practice.
Robida Collective works at the intersection of written and spoken words – with Robida magazine and Radio Robida – and spatial practices, developed in relation to the village of Topolò/Topolove (Italy), where the collective is based. Robida takes care of the abandoned terraces, occupies houses and gardens, opened a communal space, its own Academy of Margins and a summer school. Through its cultural production Robida collective tries to re-imagine the future of their village and post-rural places in general.
Herkes İçin Mimarlık Derneği (Architecture for All Association) founded in Istanbul in 2011, is a platform where local residents, students, professionals, and decision-makers collaborate to address social issues in Turkey and beyond. It focuses on challenges such as the needs of underrepresented groups and ecological destruction, by exploring solutions through architecture and design to foster awareness and action. In both urban and rural contexts, the collective aims to contribute to a critical architectural practice that is non-hierarchical, participatory, and rooted in community collaboration. Through inclusive approaches often lacking in traditional practices, many of the association’s projects are hands-on, in situ, and emphasize experiential learning through participation and community involvement.
Bios
Bianca Elzenbaumer is a feminist design researcher based in the Italian Alps. Elzenbaumer is a founding member of the design practice Brave New Alps and of the community academy La Foresta. She is a member of the Community Economies Institute. Her 40-year research plan focuses on supporting and creating community economies and commons starting from the places she lives in. She completed her doctorate at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2014. She holds an MA in Communication Art & Design from the Royal College of Art and an MA in Mediation and International Peacebuilding from the University of Bologna.
Aljaž Škrlep is a writer, teacher, and radio practitioner, based in the border village of Topolò/Topolove. As a member of the Robida Collective, he co-curates its theoretical program and leads its radio activities. His literary-theoretical interests lie in marginal writing practices and the poetics of linguistic stuttering. As a philosopher and inhabitant of a borderland, his recent work has been dedicated to conceptual explorations of border imaginaries. His engagement with these themes also extends beyond theoretical reflection into practice, as he actively transmits and communicates them through radio, column writing, pedagogical work, and workshops.
Debra Solomon is an artist, infrastructure activist, and PhD candidate in Urban Planning at the University of Amsterdam. She is founder of Urbaniahoeve, a critical spatial practice focused on inter-relations with a multispecies whole, addressing urban biodiversity, climate crisis mitigation, and the more-than-human right to the city and the urban metabolism. Solomon coined the term “multispecies urbanism” and co-initiated the 56-hectare Amsterdam Zuidoost food forest (VBAZO) in 2018. Since 2022, she has collaborated with Ljubljana’s Krater Collective as mentor in the Feral Palace project and artist-in-residence in Crafting Biodiversity (2024–2025), part of the EU co-funded Made-In initiative.
Danica Sretenović is an architect and curator at Krater Collective. She engages with critical spatial theory and feral curatorial politics to support localized utopias—places, concepts, and practices that hold transformative potential within the world as it is (Acting Architecturally). She has created interdisciplinary curricula (School of Feral Grounds, Feral Palace), urban guerrilla interventions, and planning strategies (Krater, Europan 17, Feral Cartographies & Typologies). Her work spans exhibitions (Ars Electronica 2024, 2nd Chicago Biennial, Silent Green Kulturquartier, 35th Biennial of Graphic Arts Ljubljana), publications (edu.arh: Practices in Architectural Education, Nonuments), and a range of roles—including executive curator and editor, lecturer, and experimental documentary director.
Mina Öner is an Istanbul-based architect, eco-builder and clay mural artist. She has been a member of Herkes İçin Mimarlık (Architecture for All) since 2016. Her master’s research on adobe stabilisation for post-disaster housing has continued through on-site experimentation. As a co-founder of Poçolana Works, she works at the intersection of architecture, craft, and activism, leading workshops, designing clay murals, and collaborating with NGOS to promote earth-based construction methods in Turkey and the Balkans. After the 2023 earthquake in Turkey, she co-coordinated the Kahramanmaraş Superadobe Children’s Library, a participatory rebuilding project that centres ecological resilience and gender equity. She currently co-leads a design studio in Istanbul focusing on earthen plasters, clay-based artworks, and sustainable product designs.
Merve Gül Özokcu is an architect, researcher, and activist based in Istanbul, working at the intersection of the commons, eco-feminist narratives, and spatial justice. Through Herkes İçin Mimarlık (Architecture for All), she has co-led participatory, long-term, and proactive on-site interventions addressing political and ecological urgencies through collective action across Turkey. Merve is part of Arazi Assembly, a research collective based in Southeast Anatolia, focusing on decolonial, care-driven knowledge practices. Her academic work explores alternative pedagogies and the performativity of architecture as a site of power, precarity, and resistance. Her projects – including Occupy Gezi Architecture, Women Narrative Spaces, and The Revitalisation of Abandoned Rural Schools – have been shared in contexts ranging from international institutions to rural commons.
Eylül Şenses is a curator and programmer at Salt Research and Programs, Istanbul. Her curatorial practice focuses on urban and rural commons, spatial and environmental justice with a particular emphasis on socially and politically engaged practices. She is one of the founding members of the Urban Studies Cooperative (Urban.koop), a collective network of urbanists, artists, and creatives who are willing to co-develop urban policies, programs, and projects for the local communities. Additionally, she is a co-founder of ANATOPIA, an emerging cooperative that embraces the extended geography we inhabit as a deep time and expansive ground, aiming to reestablish the narrative with hope. Together with Magnus Ericson, she is the curator of Practice Matters.
Magnus Ericson is a Stockholm-based curator and educator working across design, architecture, urbanism, and art. He is currently Head of IASPIS Applied Arts, leading the program related to design, crafts, architecture, spatial and urban practice. He has over the years, in different institutional settings and as an independent curator, combined curatorial and pedagogical practice with an emphasis on socially engaged critical practice, alternative pedagogies and organising spaces for learning. He is the founder and co-curator of the IASPIS project Urgent Pedagogies and together with Eylül Şenses, the curator of Practice Matters.
Practice Matters is an IASPIS project and platform for inquiring, highlighting and discussing design, architecture, spatial and urban practice and its ability to act in relation to present urgent issues of crisis and conflicts. It aims to respond to an urgent need to discuss how artistic practices may organise and act in response to global challenges – from climate change and ecological collapses, geopolitical and economic crisis and displacement of people to issues of democracy, social justice and equality. The project engages with practices acting between and across artistic and civic society practice, social movements and activism, research and pedagogies, and explores the role of cultural and educational institutions and organisations. Practice Matters unfolds through meetings, public events and publishing. In bringing together a plurality of practices, fields of knowledge and experiences, the project aims to serve as a common space and resource to discuss, think together, (un-)learn and re-think the role and possibilities of design, architecture, spatial and urban practice today.